"This work is unlike any other, in its range of rich, conjuring imagery and its dexterity, its smart voice. Carroll-Hackett doesn’t spare us—but doesn’t save us—she draws a blueprint of power and class with her unflinching pivot: matter-of-fact and tender." —Jan Beatty

Some people you meet are just GOOD, to the core, the real-by-gawd goodness shimmering from them like light. Mike Hamer, my office mate in my first teaching job at East Carolina University, was one of those people, good, smart, kind, funny, gentle, authentic, loving, decent to the core.

Rest in Peace, Mike. Travel safely and sweetly. This world will miss you sorely, but I can already hear the heavenly music from here.

Make art about someone whose goodness emanates, shines, in everything they do. Pay tribute to them while they’re still walking here with us.

The older fuller form was curses are like chickens; they always come home to roost, meaning that your offensive words or actions are likely at some point to rebound on you. The idea goes back to Chaucer, though he expressed it rather differently in The Parson’s Tale, around 1390, writing that curses are like “a bird that returns again to his own nest”….